Is Microsoft's Sparkle the New Flash?

Anyone who spends any time on the Web is familiar with Flash presentations. They're practically inescapable, they're usually fast, and they're easy to create. And now, they're in danger of being replaced—that is, if you’re buying what Microsoft has to sell you. Matthew David previews Microsoft's answer to the ubiquitous Flash: a new product whose beta name is "Sparkle."

Like this article? We recommend

Like this article? We recommend

Earlier this year, Adobe made a big stir by acquiring Macromedia. The point
of the acquisition, it can be argued, was Macromedia's Flash, the rationale
being that Flash is delivering on the promise of what's possible through
the Internet. While dynamic Flash applications from banking to insurance to
digital photos have been spawning all over the Internet, it appeared that
Microsoft was too focused on search, XML, and .NET to notice this
revolution.

Guess again.

Microsoft recently announced a new product called Expression Sparkle
Interactive Designer, which is one of three products in the upcoming
Expression family. The other two are Expression Acrylic Graphics Designer (an
illustration and graphics design tool) and Expression Quartz Web Designer (a
tool for designing Web sites).

NOTE

Sparkle, Acrylic, and Quartz are all beta code names for the products.

All That Glitters Is Not Flash

Acrylic Product Manager Forest Kay describes Sparkle this way: "Sparkle
Interactive Designer is a bridge product between the graphics illustrator,
creating drawings with Expression Graphics Designer, and the application
developer using Visual Studio 2005." Through Sparkle, designers can create
graphically pleasing interactive experiences in a common format shared with the
programmers.

At a recent conference, Microsoft Senior Vice President Jim Allchin delivered
something unexpected and exciting—a version of Microsoft's new
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) running in Apple's Safari on a Mac.
Next, he took the presentation and ran it in Internet Explorer 7, and then he
wrapped up the presentation running WPF on a mobile phone. The version of WPF he
was running is a stripped-down version called Windows Presentation
Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E), which has many of the bells and whistles
you'll find in the full WPF for Windows Vista. What WPF/E
doesn't have is support for 3D, hardware accelerators, and some of
the high-end features that only power developers really want in Windows
Vista.

The core of WPF/E is XAML (pronounced ZAM-ul), the XML presentation language
for WPF graphics, with JavaScript providing interaction. This means that WPF/E
can use Acrylic Graphic Designer illustrations and many of the features within
Sparkle.

Allchin believes that Microsoft is "light-years ahead of anyone else in
this space." By "anyone else," he indirectly refers to two
technologies: Macromedia's Flash and SVG. In many ways, Allchin's
comment is more rhetoric than fact. Many of the features built in
Macromedia's Flash 8 mirror those of the preview version of WPF/E. On the
other side of the coin, Apple has been stoically working to add SVG support to
Safari. Both of these technologies compete directly for WPF/E space.

On the whole, the Flash development community is treating the new WPF/E
solution from Microsoft with a certain amount of skepticism. Theodore Patrick,
founder and acting CEO of
IFBIN Networks and
a prominent Flash evangelist, puts it pretty strongly: "The WPF/E
initiative is very similar to the threat posed by SVG. SVG had WC3 standards
support [and] Adobe's financial backing, but failed to compete with Flash.
The Macromedia Flash Player is widely deployed, backwardly compatible,
cross-platform, cross-device, and is available today. In the end, Flash will
continue to be the gold standard for interactive development because it
works."

WPF/E is certainly an interesting new technology. There's no doubt that
the new Web is going to be all about presentation, whether you choose Flash,
WPF/E, or SVG. At this time, the only real loser is good old-fashioned HTML.